


a quiet color

by capricornia



Category: K-pop, SEVENTEEN (Band)
Genre: 8jun are not demons, Alternate Universe - Demons, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Character Study, M/M, Magical Realism, Minor character is a demon, i guess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-21
Updated: 2020-06-21
Packaged: 2021-03-04 08:14:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,152
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24846622
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/capricornia/pseuds/capricornia
Summary: Sometimes Minghao is left outside with whoever remains of the people who have come through the forest to beg Junhui for help or an easy passage, waiting for Junhui to open the door. He can wait years.He has waited years for Junhui.
Relationships: Wen Jun Hui | Jun/Xu Ming Hao | The8
Comments: 24
Kudos: 87





	a quiet color

**Author's Note:**

  * For [figure8](https://archiveofourown.org/users/figure8/gifts).



> First off, happy birthday to my dear friend Len, the OG 8junist who got me into Seventeen. This one's for you.
> 
> Secondly, this is a companion piece to a larger fic I'm working on but haven't published yet. If you follow me anywhere else, you may have seen me reference "demonverse." This work is set in that universe. Obviously, as I haven't finished that yet, it is not necessary to know anything about that story in order to read this one.
> 
> Also! This is my first Seventeen fic! My first RPF! wow! *jazz hands*
> 
> I hope you enjoy!

Minghao screams. The pain is everywhere—in his head, in his outstretched fingers, in his legs underneath him, behind his closed eyes—but it is mostly in his heart, and in his spirit.

He hears laughter, but it’s distant, coming in behind the ringing in his ears. 

He wonders very briefly how long this will take. He does not know how big the forest is. How many trees there are at the edge of the world. Sprouts shoot through damp earth. Branches fall, water shoots up roots, and Minghao feels all of it like a newborn in a breeze.

***

_Cadences, real cadences, real cadences and a quiet color. Careful and curved, cake and sober, all accounts and mixture, a guess at anything is righteous, should there be a call there would be a voice._

— Gertrude Stein, “Tender Buttons (Rooms)”

***

_bùduàn de zhuìluò / zhuìluò zhōng chénmò  
_ _dédào shénme yòu shīqù shénme?_

_falling endlessly / falling in silence  
_ _what have i gained and what have i lost?_

— Xu Minghao, “Falling Down”

***

Dimly, Minghao becomes aware of his surroundings again. A hand on his arm. An inchworm crawling up his thigh. Leaves scattered around him in a circle, and him on the mossy ground, like a character in a film. His throat, which is very sore. He hears water bubbling somewhere.

A hand on his arm. He twists around and looks up.

The man behind him is beautiful. Tall, dressed all in white. “What is your name?” the stranger says. Minghao does not know what language he speaks. He wonders if it is the language of death.

“Am I—” Minghao croaks out, but he coughs and cannot finish. The man’s eyes widen. He crouches down and puts his other hand on Minghao’s shoulder. He ducks his head to catch Minghao’s gaze.

“What’s your name?” he asks, quieter. 

If he really is death, it probably won’t matter who knows his name pretty soon. If Minghao really is stuck here, it won’t matter how it’s used. “Xu Minghao,” Minghao mumbles. “That’s my name.”

The stranger swallows; Minghao can hear it. The hand on his shoulder twitches. 

“Welcome,” the stranger says in Mandarin, voice sweet and low, “to the forest.”

And Minghao crumbles into his arms and shakes and shakes and shakes.

***

Junhui never talks about the moment they met. The forest accounts for language, Minghao knows now. He understands the woodland creatures, and the elves, and the sprites. And the people he leads through the forest.

He understands the trees more than most, of course. His heart is in the trees.

(He doesn’t understand Junhui.)

Junhui lives in the house at the end of the forest. He has many guests over the years. People Minghao leads through the forest, and people he brings back himself. Junhui is not always in the house to receive the guests Minghao brings. He leaves to attend to the other part of his job, which he describes as _helping people make decisions_ and Minghao usually describes as _lurking_ or sometimes _an excuse to go get the groceries_. His unpredictable absences are just another constant in Minghao’s life, which is as stagnant as the muddy puddles after it rains.

Sometimes Minghao is left outside with whoever remains of the people who have come through the forest to beg Junhui for help or an easy passage, waiting for Junhui to open the door. He can wait years. 

He has waited years for Junhui.

Junhui doesn’t talk about the neat rows of rocks outside the house either. Not everyone in the forest can read the inscriptions on them—which is to say, only Minghao and Junhui would know what they say, if they looked. Which they don’t. Minghao has a notebook full of faces and Junhui doesn’t go out the front door. The forest is not kind.

The guests Junhui brings with him are the more interesting ones. They’re rare, for one thing. Maybe once every few years. (Minghao gave up counting the days long ago.) They’re too important to face Junhui out in the world, or something. Minghao doesn’t know how Junhui decides to actively help people like he does. Who needs him, who is worthy. Maybe it has nothing to do with him though. Maybe he’s just as trapped as Minghao. 

Minghao is not a guest in Junhui’s house but rather more like a cousin, come in from the rain on the way to somewhere else, eating snacks and drinking coke in the background. 

He thinks often of the moment they met. Nothing big happened then — that’s the problem. Junhui said, oh, years ago now, that probably the biggest decision in Minghao’s life had already happened. And Junhui wasn’t there for it, which means Minghao isn’t who he thought he was going to be when he’d started out his journey. 

(What he has called “adventure” to anyone who has asked, which has been Seokmin and Mingyu and Samuel and that’s it. The word sounds more poetic than something like _quest_. A quest is when you find what you are looking for. Minghao remembers staring in wonder at the trees painted on rice paper and thinking, _that is what art is_. He’d wanted to be as fiercely known as the ancient brush strokes with the kind of desire that filled his veins with acid.)

Minghao has since seen Junhui in all his glory, shrouded in light and fizzling with magic, facing the people who hold the keys to the world. There will be no moment in a storybook with a big circle drawn around it for him, because the Junhui standing opposite Minghao is just a tall man from Shenzhen, hopelessly and dizzyingly real. 

He is no history-maker, just someone who funnels other people through the forest to Junhui’s house. The rest doesn’t matter anymore. Dusk closes in on the day, and Minghao will eventually disappear into the night with no mark anywhere except for the wine glasses in Junhui’s house of abandoned objects. 

(The night rests on the other side of the house. Minghao does not go out the back door.)

It’s not that he’s bitter, exactly, it’s just that he made his mistake a long, long time ago.

***

Junhui doesn’t talk about his family. 

Minghao knows he has a brother, and parents, and that he hasn’t seen them in a while. Every so often, he catches himself wondering how old they are. How old his brother must be. Minghao has no brother. He refuses to wonder about Junhui’s parents’ ages. 

(He has a sketchbook filled with lines and scribbles and he makes shapes out of the leaves that have fallen on the ground and he doesn’t think about it. He tries to focus on the present, which is him in the forest and Junhui in the house at the edge of it. His fabled task, and Junhui’s.)

He wonders if Junhui thinks about his family as often as Minghao does. Every time he remembers his life before—the middle period of his life, he might call it—he thinks of the smoke of the city, and of Mingyu in his imported clothes, and of the way Seokmin’s thighs shook under him as he’d covered his face with his hand so Minghao couldn’t see his tears (like Minghao couldn’t sense them anyway, like Minghao wasn’t crying too). And he thinks of Junhui’s family. 

They’re there like a shadow in every memory. He’s been around Junhui so long now that there is no longer a _Before Junhui_ but just whatever Minghao was doing when Junhui was doing something else. And so when Minghao was painting and studying and making bargains that would later bite him in the ass, Junhui was not yet born, and when Minghao was training hard in damp underground places and in the hot sun, Junhui was setting off with a little backpack to school, and when Minghao was still training, Junhui was training too. 

Junhui has a photograph of his brother. Minghao has no photographs of anybody. (He’s lost the ones he took of Mingyu, or maybe that was before they invented demon-proof film; Minghao can’t remember.) 

Sometimes guests ask about the photographs around the house. Minghao remembers them taking ages, but Junhui lives in a world where you can click the shutter and watch the grey box slide into colors like the dawn sped up. People who stay in the house don’t always take their things with them when they leave, and so there are a lot of items Junhui has collected over the years, including cameras. The Polaroids are neat. There are quite a few of them, sitting on random surfaces in the house and gathering dust. Frozen images of Junhui eating, of Minghao painting, of the sunlight through the trees. The rolls of film are more complicated. Junhui doesn’t like looking at them, though he holds them up against the kitchen light to see the end of the roll where his face and Minghao’s fill up the spaces. Junhui is the only keeper of the rest of the memories in the film rolls. They’re memories no one needs anymore.

***

Minghao frowns down at the bottle of soy sauce. “Where did you get this stuff, anyway?”

“Half of it in China last week, half of it in California yesterday,” Junhui says. “Some convenience store. I hope it’s alright; the carrots are kind of wilted.” 

Minghao picks up a carrot and waves it around. It bends. “I would love to go to California someday,” he says. “Did you know there’s gold there? And beautiful bridges. And wine.”

Junhui smiles and shakes his head. “There’s no gold there,” he says, kneading the dumpling dough too aggressively. “Not anymore.” He has flour on his nose.

“Well, there are beautiful bridges there, and wine,” Minghao says. 

“Xiao Hao,” Junhui says sadly. 

“I’ll go there someday,” Minghao insists. 

Junhui just nods. “Okay,” he says, then, “I think we’re ready to shape the dumplings.”

***

The times when Junhui brings people home, Minghao gets surprised. He’s not, technically speaking, supposed to be in the house, but he’s always been one for more cultivated things, like cooked food and fruit smoothies. Nothing has ever happened to him as a result of being in the house instead of out in the trees, and he does his job well enough in the forest that he figures he’s owed some free time to do what he wants with Junhui’s weird appliances. And so Junhui brings little kids with wide eyes and dark fortunes and turns on the television to watch cartoons with them while Minghao is in the shower, and he brings a wizard while Minghao is sitting in the bed in his underwear, and he brings a whole group of elves and shapeshifters while Minghao is vacuuming. 

A member of that group breaks off and starts helping him clean, and that’s when Minghao sees Mingyu for the first time in almost a hundred years.

They stare at each other over the vacuum. Minghao knows Mingyu recognizes him; Mingyu is a fire demon, and demons do not forget things like faces. 

“Myungho?” Mingyu says, because he met Minghao in Korea and he knows not to use Minghao’s real name when it could be dangerous. Minghao returns the favor and just looks at him instead of answering. This has never deterred Mingyu before, and so he asks Minghao “What are you doing here?” in the loudest whisper Minghao has ever heard.

“I live here,” Minghao says, the small smile that he can’t help when Mingyu is near him creeping onto his face. Mingyu looks around and raises an eyebrow at the curtains that Minghao tied knots at the bottoms of days (weeks?) ago. There’s a bottle of nice wine on the bookshelf, too, and none of the books next to it are Junhui’s, which Mingyu would know if he’d ever bothered to ask Minghao about what he reads. “Why are _you_ here?” he asks Mingyu. 

Mingyu grins at him like he just gifted him an entire building on fire. “I don’t know,” he says, way too excited for the situation. “I was just kind of helping out this group of shapeshifters with setting a trap for this rich dude, right, and I was supposed to bring the fire to cause a distraction, and we ran into these elves, and then the elves caught the guy and then this man showed up and then we all just kind of appeared here. And you were vacuuming. And—oh, that’s the guy,” he says, nodding his chin at someone behind Minghao. Minghao turns to see Junhui leaning against the wall, watching them.

“Yeah,” Minghao says, reaching up to push Mingyu’s bangs out of his face as he turns back around. “That’s—I live here with him.”

“Is he a human?” Mingyu wants to know, and Minghao smiles and smiles and smiles and he says, “He’s the most human of them all.” 

(From what he has seen of humans since he left home, this feels like a lie. From the books Minghao has read, all the stories he knows, it’s the closest to the truth he has ever gotten. Junhui’s personality to Minghao is like the old stories, where the humans outwit the evils and save everyone.)

He doesn’t tell Mingyu about how he got to the forest in the first place. It was a long time ago, anyway. After Mingyu, but still a long time ago. Minghao has learned that in the face of guests in the house caught in the middle of the biggest decisions of their lives, saying “I purposely left my home and came here for the adventure” won’t make them look at him kindly. He doesn’t care what people think, but he’d rather not give them a reason to hate him. Even if they’ll be gone the next day.

Mingyu helps Minghao finish cleaning the living room and then he bakes cookies while the shapeshifters and elves deliberate about their next steps, and then he leaves. 

Another day with Junhui, another group of guests in the house. Another person on the cusp.

Minghao isn’t on the cusp of anything at all.

***

Junhui doesn’t say where exactly he learned his magic. Minghao knows tree sprites and their magic, and he knows demons because of Mingyu and wizards because of Seokmin, but whatever Junhui does is something different. There’s a darkness in him that’s deeper than the one Minghao knows. A gravity, like he carries the sky on his shoulders. 

***

Junhui fucks up the dumplings. 

It’s not their first fight, and it isn’t really about the dumplings, but it is the first time Minghao leaves. 

“I’m sorry I messed up the dumplings,” Junhui says. His Mandarin slides over Minghao like a warm jacket, and Minghao hates it. 

“You should have gotten the ingredients in the right place,” he says. “I thought you were a perfectionist. You can’t buy Chinese ingredients in California and expect them to be the same.”

Junhui stands up from the table. He’s taller than Minghao, and Minghao takes a step back to look him in the face. “I’m doing the best that I can with what I have,” Junhui says. “I didn’t have that much time. I didn’t ask to go to China, and I didn’t ask to go to California. That’s just where I had to go.”

Minghao sneers. “Didn’t you?” 

Minghao is pretty certain that someone can take Junhui’s job. Someone only needs to be in the house, someone willing to be there. Junhui looks as if Minghao has slapped him.

“I got those things for you,” he says. “I wanted to make the dumplings with you. _With_ you, Minghao. That’s the point; don’t you get it?”

***

The thing is, Junhui shouldn’t be allowed to go shopping at all. 

This is a problem, because he’s the one who can leave the forest. Minghao asks him to bring all kinds of things. He asks for nice wine and sparkling water and when that doesn’t work, cheap wine and orange juice. Junhui brings him the orange juice, but it’s some awful combination of orange and peach that sets Minghao’s tongue curling in on itself in disgust. Junhui shrugs when Minghao doesn’t finish it. He shudders all over at the sweetness when he tries it, but it’s gone in about ten seconds. 

The house has a hot dog machine in it. Minghao wishes for maybe a nice electric grill or something, then settles for wishing the hot dog machine wouldn’t live in the middle of the living room.

He lets himself in one afternoon after being away for a week and finds the hot dog machine next to the bed, right there on the floor. 

He makes no comment. 

One time, Junhui brings back some food from America after a trip—crispy chicken fried in batter, with little packets of ketchup and honey. Junhui and him, they’re like honey and fried chicken. Too sweet, too savory, just enough to make him want more. Just this side of strangers to argue about. 

***

Junhui is Chinese. 

In a place full of spirits and magical beings and demons and doors to other worlds, it should not matter. They aren’t from the same place. Their accents are different, and their memories do not overlap. 

It matters anyway. 

He talks to Minghao in Mandarin when they’re alone, and when they’re alone among the elves and the sprites and the spirits and all the other creatures in the forest. He understands what Minghao means when he says _breakfast_ and _my parents_.

Minghao has spent years and years thinking about where he’s from, and then not thinking about where he’s from. He’s an expert at it like he’s an expert at dancing and tending to the forest and hiding things. (He studies hard.) He’s spent more years with people who speak his language like they’re reading off an invisible barrier in front of them than he’s spent with people who know how his voice sounds in its most natural form. 

(Junhui does not know what he means when he says _home_ , because Minghao doesn’t say it.)

He’d left as a young adult—barely a young adult—searching for adventure in no uncertain terms. He knew what he wanted, and he went after it in a way that makes him proud. (Mostly.) He’d left with goals, of course, ones that followed him all through China and Korea. Dreams. He’d planned to come to the forest, after Seokmin. 

(There’s an old story in the forest about the line of mushrooms that leads from the edge of it to Minghao’s tree. They say each mushroom is a teardrop, or maybe a drop of blood, depending on the storyteller.) 

He’d planned his quest; he’d anticipated his task. (Mostly. He refuses to have been tricked, but, well. Sometimes he wakes from dreams with his own screaming ringing in his ears. The heart of the forest, in every broken branch a kindred pain.) 

He hadn’t planned on Junhui. The fork in his road.

Decisions on decisions on decisions. 

None of them mattered enough, in the end.

***

Years after he met Junhui, there were kisses and Junhui touching the side of his face and his arms and his stomach and lower still, but these moments were—have been—like pieces of gravel building up in a stream. Decisions, sure, choices, yes, but there are no consequences in the forest, not like the kind Junhui deals in. Not big, earth-shaking ones. Nothing to change the course of the river. Not for them. Not for Minghao, who cannot leave.

(Junhui is Chinese, but he speaks the language of possibilities.)

In poetic terms, it sometimes feels like Minghao is alone on a raft on the vast surface of an ocean, watching the sharks and the garbage float by underneath the surface. Like he’s a leaf on a puddle. A piece of dried paint on a canvas. A broken slat in window blinds. 

In lay terms, he’s kind of over it.

Junhui has all the world to walk through. He knows the stars, knows the sun and the moon and the darkness. He whispers to Minghao about _forever, infinity_ , and he kisses Minghao in the dark like it’s the most natural thing in the world. The sound of his voice, in word or in tone. The shape of his tears, his praise, his gasp. His fingers, pressed firm on Minghao’s thigh. Touch, the universal language, with a history unspoken and unacknowledged. Unnecessary. 

(And Minghao is at the end of his rope.)

***

“Junhui,” Minghao says. He is so tired. Tired of Junhui, tired of his trips, tired of his task. He’s read many stories in his long life. There are a few he remembers very clearly—Atlas, with the sky on his shoulders. Sisyphus, forever at work, never reaping the rewards, never seeing an end. “It isn’t just the dumplings.”

“Junhui,” Minghao says, “we are not the same.”

***

He knows what Junhui’s face looks like when it breaks. Junhui is a very busy man. He goes everywhere, and he comes back sometimes beaming with pride like it’s his first decade on earth, and sometimes he comes back and cries on Minghao’s shoulder while Minghao sits silently and works on his sewing projects. He’s always expressive like that. 

Sometimes he comes back and doesn’t tell Minghao he’s there, and Minghao knocks and knocks on his door and senses no movement inside. Those are the worst times.

Minghao knows how to hide in plain sight. Junhui folds his hiding around him like a blanket at a sleepover, but the kind where he’s in the kitchen and everyone else is trying to sit down and eat their pancakes and he’s taking up all the space at the table with the mounds of blanket that everyone sees before they can even get a glimpse of his face. 

Junhui lives with his whole body, but Minghao isn’t like that. Minghao feels trapped in his head sometimes, like his body is only an extension of his thoughts. 

(Junhui used to share all his thoughts, when they’d first met. It had set Minghao on edge. Back then they didn’t fight; Minghao was too closed-off, and Junhui was too open. Or maybe it was only before Minghao had learned how to walk in the forest. Minghao knows he has never been as hidden from Junhui as he would like to be.)

So Minghao knows what Junhui looks like broken-hearted. He walks the length of the forest, back to his lonely tree at the edge, and tries not to think about it.

Minghao leaves the first time. Junhui takes the second, and third. Minghao sneaks back into the house to use the juicer and sees Junhui with his tongue down the throat of some guest. He doesn’t bring it up the next time, but he does the time after that. 

Leaving doesn’t matter, either. There’s a whole forest of trees to leave under. A whole forest and that’s it for Minghao. 

Junhui can leave the house with a guest. It would be quite a big decision for them, to shoulder his responsibility. It would be easy for Junhui to find the one to do it, offer them the choice and then go. He can fuck off and travel wherever, see whomever he wants to see, do whatever he wants to do. Maybe even forever. Minghao doesn’t know if Junhui can age; he himself stopped aging a long time ago, as a result of his bargain. Trees can live a long time in the same image. 

But Junhui stays in the house.

***

Junhui knows more than he lets on. This is an important piece to know about Junhui. Minghao needs everyone to know it with the same desperate longing he feels about his own legacy. Junhui knows more than he lets on. It’s better than other things he could list, like _Junhui is stupid sometimes_ and _Junhui is annoying_ and _Junhui is the worst_. Those are things he keeps in his chest right next to the heart that has _Wen Junhui_ written on it, as if holding them there will make sure other people don’t think the same things. It doesn’t matter; nobody is around to hear Minghao talk about Junhui anyway. Not in the way that matters. Not in Minghao’s language.

Minghao is bitter. Sour, like lemons, like a whole host of other metaphors he is too tired to write down. Not about Junhui, although that particular brand of anger comes and goes. This bitterness has been a dull throb in the back of his mind since he left home—since he left Mingyu, since he left Seokmin, since he left himself screaming in the middle of the woods—but it’s simmering now, almost on the brink. On the brink of what, he doesn’t know. Maybe he’ll snap and walk out that back door into the night. 

_Do not go gentle_ , Samuel had told him once, but only Junhui can tell if the night is good or not. 

Junhui does not tell him this, but he leaves his door open and presses his lips to Minghao’s eyelids and says, _everything about you is good_ , and so Minghao doesn’t ask him.

The nature of Junhui’s job means that he knows things. Minghao knows about the forest, and its animals and creatures and other inhabitants. But Junhui speaks with the stars; Junhui disappears in puffs of smoke and reappears with rival princes; Junhui meets with demons and grants them passage. Minghao’s training involved a lot of practical dance magic, and a lot of meditating while holding various plants and things. Junhui’s training seems to have involved a lot of theory—he stands at the edge of the world and touches the other side. 

And he knows Minghao. 

This is why Minghao allows Junhui to hold his hand while they’re watching movies on Junhui’s amazing signal-receiving television, and when Junhui brings back combs and sunglasses and shoes and he sits Minghao down on the bathroom counter and styles his hair and slides the glasses up his nose and tries to push Minghao’s shoes on by the door before he gets frustrated and huffs out “just do it yourself,” Minghao repositions his glasses and pulls on the shoes and doesn’t say anything. 

Minghao is old, older than almost anyone Junhui knows, and he remembers things Junhui has only heard of in history classes, but Junhui has been in the forest longer, in the stories longer than Minghao has. He is also frozen ahead of Minghao, brain just slightly older, and for these reasons, Minghao calls him _ge_ in his unguarded moments. 

Junhui knows the way the forest works. He’d taught Minghao his job, when the old Guardian left. When he—when Minghao came into the forest. He’d told Minghao what to do. 

He is so kind, Minghao often thinks. Kind to have helped Minghao out without saying it explicitly that that was what he was doing. Kind to listen to Minghao’s stories, to fill in his silences. Kind to see him when he was raw and frustrated and wanting so badly he’d burn with it. Kind to kiss him when the wanting gave way to an ache in his bones and a heaviness in his heart. 

He was kind to leave spinach in the fridge for his smoothies when Minghao was done with him being kind. 

_You are good_ , he says as he holds Minghao’s cheeks, _your eyes, your nose, your lips, your face, your body_. He kisses Minghao and Minghao feels like he’s been turned inside out. _Everything about you is good_ , Junhui tells him when he doubts himself. Minghao doesn’t say anything. He just folds himself into Junhui and listens.

***

Junhui is not selfish.

Minghao has seen it time and time again. He doesn’t talk about it; there’s no plan in place for it. Guests come and go. The house fills up with foreign souls, then empties, and Junhui’s hands are just as steady as they always are. 

(Almost always. Junhui trembles when he’s nervous. The nervousness comes before, and after, but never during.) 

Junhui would burn the house down if a guest needed it. Fact. Junhui would give his beloved hot dogs to someone if they asked for one. Fact. Junhui is not selfish. 

Junhui is like a planet, and Minghao circles around him like a moon, sometimes obviously, sometimes hidden. Fact. Junhui is like the ocean. Minghao is just a fish in his sea. Maybe a sea anemone, actually. Those are pretty neat. They remind him of all the lives he’s led. Fact. 

Minghao is more selfish than Junhui. He takes the cracked eggshells that litter the forest floor and the pieces of metal that the elves dig up and fashions them into beautiful things. Junhui wears the earrings Minghao made ten years ago almost every day.

Junhui is not selfish. Someday someone is going to come along and ask Junhui for too much. And he is going to give himself to them, body, mind and soul, and Minghao will be left to fade into the background.

(The trees in the distance are scarier than the night.)

Junhui refuses things just as much as Minghao does, but he’s way more annoying about it. He’s contrary. He’s stubborn, one of the most stubborn people Minghao has known. He’s loud, and honest in a way that hurts. He doesn’t talk about the things he’s worried about, and Minghao has to watch and watch and drag it out of him. 

Junhui is all over the place, but he is not selfish.

Minghao tells him about the places he’s been and how much more of the world he wants to see. (Speaking positively is better for the health than speaking negatively.) Junhui brings things back from his travels, and he kisses Minghao as soon as he sees him, and Minghao cannot find it in him to be jealous. At this point, Junhui is more like an extension of himself. And so Minghao puts the San Francisco keychain on his belt loop and the snowglobes in the hollow underneath his favorite tree with the false door he spent six months making, and he kisses Junhui back.

(But Minghao is not the moon and he is not the stars and he is not drowning in Junhui. He is just a tree standing on the edge of the world.)

***

Junhui listens to music that feels like it’s touching all the parts of Minghao’s ear at once, all the time. Minghao writes on the backs of fallen pieces of bark. Half of poetry is in the spaces. 

Junhui, for all he’s in the stories the same as Minghao, is human, or at least he was. Minghao is a tree spirit, just close enough to regenerative nature to not be classified as a demon. (Now. He is now. Some of the knots on the trees in the forest look like faces, and he wonders about it at night.)

Nobody asks, but Minghao writes down that they don’t work together anyway. He makes a list for Junhui ( _l_ _ychees, tofu, tea leaves_ ), and Junhui kisses him before he goes. He comes back with different items and _I understand, xiao Hao, I know_ on his lips, pressed in Minghao’s hair as they rock together on the floor. 

They’re not supposed to get along, Minghao insists. Junhui is frustrating and Minghao gets mad. Minghao is maddening and Junhui gets frustrated. 

The house is decorated with years and years of the careful touch of Minghao’s paintbrush. Junhui’s skin is decorated with years of the careful touch of Minghao’s care. Junhui, Minghao’s axis.

***

The thing is, Minghao is stuck. Stuck in the forest. Stuck in his own head, with his heart out there in the trees. Stuck underneath Junhui, carrying out stories he doesn’t know if anyone listens to anymore. There aren’t so many guests now. People have forgotten them. Junhui still leaves, but nobody tells either of them what is happening in the world. In their world, of demons and shapeshifters and wizards and magic. There could be a whole war out there. And Junhui and Minghao will sit in the kitchen eating fruit and watching the dawn break through the branches.

***

“Do you know if my heart is located on the left side,” Junhui asks him, “or the right side?” 

Minghao stares at him, unsure of what he’s planning, if he’s making a joke or if Minghao should overthink it and bring up demons and spirits and ghosts. Junhui has to repeat himself.

“Left side,” Minghao says, nodding to Junhui’s hand on his breast. 

“Your side,” says Junhui, punching him none too gently. 

Minghao ducks his head and smiles and wonders whether he’s serious or not. If it’s just flirting or if he really means it. He kisses Junhui for his sweetness and bites his lip for the confusion he causes. Junhui wraps his arms around him and kisses back. 

He wants it to be true in every situation, he thinks. He wants Junhui’s heart on his side.

***

The thing is, Xu Minghao is in love with Wen Junhui. 

It’s no surprise. There’s no earth-shattering moment when he realizes it. It’s just true, in all moments, in all places. Here Minghao is in love with Junhui. And here. By the tree at the very edge of the wood. In the kitchen, in the sunlight. When Junhui is in the human cities and in the vampire dens and in the clouds. When Minghao is weak on the branch of his tree. When Minghao is crouched over him on the bed in the house. Between the sheets, between their lips, between planes and cities that separate them, the love stretches and bends and colors everything it touches. This piece of earth knows Minghao loves Junhui. And this earth. And this building. And these guests. And the squirrels and the birds Junhui loves so much and the little earthworms he keeps trying to get Minghao to get rid of that come up outside the house when it rains. 

It shouldn’t work, in theory. Junhui says things like _my home is your home_ and means _we are home to each other_ and Minghao says _we are not the same at all_ , and yet it is all true, somehow, that they are completely different and completely wrapped up in each other, one the storm, the other the eye. Mingyu was easy because he’s Kim Mingyu, and Seokmin was easy because he was a human, and Junhui is right there and the only person in the entire damn place whose mouth forms over sounds in a mirror image of Minghao, but he isn’t easy.

Minghao thinks about this as he washes the dishes sometimes. (Doing the dishes is a good way to relieve stress. He’s learned this from Mingyu.) He thinks about the wine glasses in Junhui’s cupboard and the hot dog machine that is still in the bedroom. He thinks about the orange juice and the way Junhui’s Mandarin wraps around him like a second skin. He thinks about his shoes next to Junhui’s door. Junhui’s earrings. Junhui with flour on his nose. The pretty things, and the slightly nasty things. Minghao’s nail clippings in the trash can next to Junhui’s bed. The toothpaste that they share. Junhui’s shirt that he took years ago that’s still sitting in Minghao’s tree, unwashed.

He could lie to himself and say that in certain situations, people become close, and it’s only because of the circumstances that it happens. That in the absence of friendship based on similarities, something even closer blossoms, aided and abetted by the environment, like two lone astronauts calling each other pet names as they watch the vastness of space. 

It’s not that it isn’t true, but there’s more to it than that.

Minghao thinks sometimes that if he’d met Junhui in the early days, before Mingyu and Seokmin, that they would have been like lightning and thunder, always one after the other and an utter disaster. Maybe in some other universe he and Junhui are lovers who age like other people and live in a house with a view of the beach and have two little kittens and fancy gardening gloves and a reusable shopping bag on the door handle. Maybe they’re brothers-in-arms somewhere. Minghao doesn’t think he would have chosen Junhui, back then. 

He doesn’t choose Junhui now, either, not exactly. He just smiles and smiles as Junhui opens his arms, and he loves, and is loved in return.

***

_dreams come true / yào bǎochízhe qīngxǐng  
_ _dreams come true / bùyào wàngjì chūxīn  
_ _yīdìng jīnglì hěnduō dédào hěnduō shīqù hěnduō  
_ _wúlùn rúhé / zhōng yǒu yītiān dreams come true  
_

_dreams come true / i’ve got to stay clear-minded  
_ _dreams come true / do not forget your initial heart_  
_you must experience a lot to gain a lot and lose a lot  
_ _no matter what / there will be a day dreams come true_

— Xu Minghao, “Dreams Come True”

**Author's Note:**

> Dumplings are easier to make with two people working as a pair.
> 
> "Do not go gentle" is a reference to the poem by Dylan Thomas:  
> Do not go gentle into that good night,  
> Old age should burn and rave at close of day;  
> Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
> 
> The bit about the astronauts calling each other pet names was inspired by the fic [—to remake myself](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24296041) by the wonderful pixiepower. It is a stunning work and you should all read it.
> 
> pinterest board [here](https://www.pinterest.com/horatioils/demonverse/real-cadences-a-quiet-color/).


End file.
